The Story of Kim Noble and Her Twenty Personalities

“Tell me what you pay attention to and I will tell you who you are.”
(José Ortega y Gasset) 

Ria Pratt Kim Noble. "My Hands are Tied"

 

There are stories that go into our skin like sharp needles.

It's enough to read a few lines, see images, and you are no longer able to get rid of them.

One of the ways to deal with emotional impacts that take us by surprise is to immediately activate rationality.

What does it mean?

Let's take the case I want to tell you about.

 

Recently, thanks to the suggestion of a friend of mine, I learned about the incredible story of Kim Noble. A woman suffering from DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder), or multiple personalities, linked to a childhood trauma. She has developed 20 different personalities.

It is certainly not a single or striking case; Oprah Winfrey interviewed a woman named Truddi Chase in 1990, one of the most unforgettable interviews in the history of the Oprah Show: after suffering years of horrific sexual abuse that began when she was only 2 years old, Truddi's mind split into 92 different personalities.

 

Before going into Kim's story, as I said, I would like to do as usual. Also because this is a theme that deeply affects me and that I also studied for my degree thesis.

That is, to open the books of psychology, to rationalize.

Talk about the meaning that emotions have in our daily life.

Why not?

Then Kim's story also has a strong artistic connotation, so it is inevitable to list the artists who in history have transferred their dramas and psychological traumas into art.

Yes, Van Gogh. How not to name him?

But like him dozens and dozens of other famous names in every artistic field.

This time I want to skip this part of writing.

I want to follow the advice of the great Cioran, that is to try to write, and “feel”, as if I were a snake crawling on stones.

 

So let's go back to the story of Kim Noble. First of all.

 

Kim Noble

Kim Noble is a 59-year-old mother who lives on the outskirts of London.

She also has a daughter named Aimee.

As I mentioned, Kim developed 20 different personalities as a result of sexual abuse when she was still a child.

Among Kim's personalities are “Patricia”, the primary personality; “Salome”, a devout Catholic; “Judy”, the personality who comes out at mealtimes and, despite Kim's slight frame, thinks she weighs more than 200 pounds; and “Ken”, a depressed gay man.

Then there is “Dawn”, who is the one who gave birth to Aimee.  “Only one of us could be at the birth,” Kim explains. “We couldn't all be there because only one person can be in charge.”

When “Dawn” emerged it was like she was frozen in 1997, the year Aimee was born – she believes she is still that year.

In reality “Dawn” does not recognize Aimee as her daughter, she thinks she gave birth to a daughter named “Sky” but that a friend then took away from her.

This hurt Aimee very much, feeling rejected.

It is not easy to be the daughter of a person who changes personality all the time and who has 20 different toothbrushes and different emails.

But Kim never speaks of herself as Kim Noble, but as “Patricia”: “I'm the main personality that's around,” she says. “I'm the one that keeps the house running, pays the bills and looks after Aimee, our daughter.”

“Patricia” believes whoever Kim was is now gone forever. “Things got too much for her, so she just disappeared and we have to take over the running of the body,” she says. “I believe that we were protecting her. She disappeared and she's gone to sleep.”

 

But what caused all this?

According to psychologists it was the sexual abuse suffered when she was young.

And the proof and the key to everything is the personality of “Ria Pratt”; or the one who claims to be a 12-year-old girl.

Coming back to the personality of “Patricia”, Kim says that listening to “Ria Pratt” makes her sad. “But I don't have all those memories that she's got, so I'm hearing it like a third person,” she says. “If I did, I probably would not be able to cope.”

“Patricia” claims to remember parts of Kim's childhood, but never any abuse. “Not me. I haven't had any abuse,” she says. “I'm lucky not to have had any.”

 

This is the key to understanding the mystery of this woman's mind.

While DID is a rare reaction to brain trauma, most people are familiar with the concept of repressing negative memories.

“Some aspects of experience are too unbearable for a person to survive,” she says. “When that happens, a part of the person can capture those memories and keep the rest of the person safe by holding onto those and isolating them ... The body remembers it, but it's not pushed away – it simply holds onto it and doesn't share it.”

 

Ria Pratt Kim Noble, "It's a Dog Life"

But how to convey it outside, in addition to splitting into a personality metastasis?

Thanks also to art. Because some of the therapists who treated Kim suggested her to try painting.

And then some of her personalities began to paint, each of them with different styles.

Each of them is able to expel their emotions onto the canvas, which is the fulcrum of Art Therapy.

Because our emotions are a neutral form of energy that helps us overcome grief, obstacles, defend ourselves and achieve our goals.

Often, however, our emotions are not experienced in the correct way. Repressed or unmanifested anger, unresolved grief, can lead to the creation of blocks or wounds which over time could lead to psychic or psychosomatic illnesses.

 

This was the subject of my degree thesis and that I know very well, also from personal history.

I lived it, in spite of myself, on my skin.

And it is absolutely true as it is simple: it can be summed up by imagining our psyche as a network of tubes in which fluid flows.

Each fluid has its own path, but where any event that blocks the normal flow of the liquid occurs, it does not stop but looks for another way. The river that wants to reach the sea cannot be stopped.

Psychosomatic illnesses are nothing more than this: an alternative perverse path of the normal flow of our thoughts and emotions.

The body says what the mind is no longer able to process and the words to name.

 

Kim's split into 20 personalities is her form of survival from such tremendous violence that she has – unconsciously – decided to refuse. She didn't agree to look it in the face but looked away as if it didn't exist. But that violence and her trauma, her pain, are inside her. They roar, tear apart. Therefore they multiplied in a prism of personality.

 

Ria Pratt Kim Noble. "Ted Saw All"

Ria Pratt Kim Noble. "Nowhere to Run"

This reading was made possible by observing Ria's terrible paintings.

She has painted shapes and colors that replace words that become silent, unexpressed.

Creepy images of small female figures in yellow or red abused, chained, humiliated by male, long and menacing black shapes.

They are not even sublimated into visual, allusive metaphors, but they are absolutely descriptive. Once observed, they no longer leave our memory.

Although Kim claims she does not remember anything about those violence, she paints them, in detail, discharging all responsibility on Ria

Ria was her salvation, the one who sacrificed herself for each of her personalities and guarantees her a pseudo-normal life. Indeed, it also made her an artist.

 

Ria Pratt Kim Noble. "What Ted Saw"

I am violently beaten by those paintings and this story.

Part of me recognizes the therapeutic value of art, which I have always supported.

Wherever I was talking or giving lessons, I have always spent my time in encouraging all forms of art. Without aspiring to gain who knows what recognition – the important thing is to spit out everything that burns inside us.

Not everyone has the strength and courage to recognize their weaknesses, faults, mistakes we have made in the past.

But the idea doesn't work that not saying allows us not to know or to forget.

 

I once read a beautiful story that said that what we keep inside us, what hurts us, is like a fruit that over time rots and spoils our interiority with a nauseating smell. Big truth.

Better to throw it out of us, if there is no one who listens to us or can help us.

Write, photograph, paint, draw. Sing, play, scream.

Words can change clothes as needed.

Without Ria's art, perhaps Kim Noble's personalities would have reached a hundred; however, therapists would have struggled to learn of the sexual abuse suffered at age 12.

 

I have already written about my childhood, about the repressed anger for not being able to have a normal life like all my friends, play sports, run.

My childhood was about getting in and out of hospitals and going to doctors.

I spent the afternoons watching my friends running after the ball on the edge of the football camp.

Then in the evening I would go back to my room and start drawing, in the most detailed way possible, the football actions, the goals.

And all my frustration was sublimated, indeed I was excited, it gave me pleasure to draw. Physical pleasure. It tired me like a football match.

Anything that distressed me or made me sad immediately became drawing on paper or written word.

My boy drawings

 

My boy drawings

I haven't always been that good. Doing things alone is often wrong.

And I know very well that I got sick with cancer for not accepting a terrible pain that was annihilating me.

It's hard to admit that you have loved and dedicated your life to the wrong person. Better to pretend that everything is going well, and that it will soon pass. But the body is more sincere than the mind, and with sickness it screams at us our weaknesses. Our mistakes.

I paid very dearly for it, so seeing Ria Pratt's drawings reminds me once again of the importance of communicating, in every possible form.

 

My boy drawings

You too. Never be ashamed of your emotions. Do not think that it is useless to try to express yourself, to create art.

It's not a matter of becoming famous, but it often becomes a survival of the mind.

I believe this is the most important teaching in Kim Noble's history, not so much a list of artists or psychological theories, but that of loving each other.

Don't wait for others to feel love for you. We learn to love ourselves.

Let's also give ourselves our share of personal art.

Whether it is cooking for the family, or sewing a dress, as well as photographing our parents, or drawing a flower.

 

Let our rivers reach the sea without the water hurting our shores.

 

My boy drawings

• An Old Green Letter 
• Number 100 

Part of Kim Noble's story is taken from the Oprah Winfrey interview: Life as a Mother with 20 Personalities
The site with their paintings: Kim Noble Artist

 

Italian version